Welcome back, patriots! CLICK HERE if you missed part one of this article. As you’ll see here, illegal immigrants could use payday loans to pay for backwater licensing services… if I believed in that kind of thing, which I don’t…

But the red flags are on the public record. For instance, on January 16, 2008, a woman named Gabriel Beatriz Wekid came to Maryland with an Argentina passport. She gave the address of a Delaware farm and provided a cell phone bill with the same address. It wasn’t until a document from a Delaware agency appeared that an examiner noticed a discrepancy.

Wekid lived in Newark, Delaware, but had never been to been employed by the farm she’d cited in her application. Wekid was charged with two violations of fraud law, which amounted to a $55 fine and 60 days probation. What a slap!

That’s just the tip of the iceberg

The process to obtain a Maryland driver’s license using foreign documents without visa stamps involves calling a toll-free number to schedule an appointment. MVA officials report that the volume of out-of-state calls that number receives is tremendous, on the order of one in four from 53 states and territories outside Maryland. Officials have responded by blocking out-of-state calls.

In comes industry. Someone came up with the bright (and entirely legal) idea to charge immigrants hundreds of dollars to help them get licenses. The business makes appointments, reviews documents and provides transportation and translation services. Many who don’t have the money to pay for the service face as much as an eight-month wait to get an appointment. Using false licenses has been the path for some, as the arrest numbers in Maryland can testify: they prosecuted 507 immigrants in 2008. Surely there were many that went undetected.

Fraud is allowable, says Casa de Maryland

Bribery on the institutional level doesn’t help any of this. Broken Country reports that the U.S. attorney’s office has prosecuted bribery rings that worked out of the MVA, including one under the control of Valentin Millstein, the owner of a driving school. He was convicted of “scheming with an employee and former employee… They issued more than 100 fraudulent licenses and identification cards to drivers, some illegal immigrants, who paid $2,000 each.”

Meanwhile, immigrant advocates like Kimberly Propeack of  Casa de Maryland argue that “whatever residency fraud Maryland might prevent by tightening its rules would be outweighed by a rise in internal corruption and document mills.”

What do I think? Where there’s money to be had, there will be corrupt individuals who will do whatever they can to get their hands on it. That will include document mills, in this case. However, lax licensing laws leave too big a hole for the corrupt to maintain a stranglehold on America. The line must be drawn.

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